Note: you may find [[Comcast Users And scte65scan|scte65scan]] to be an alternative option that may more easily align channel numbers.

== North America Digital Cable ==

== North America Digital Cable ==

Revision as of 21:51, 19 February 2010

HDHomeRun

The HDHomeRun, by Silicondust USA (a wholly owned subsidiary of Silicondust Engineering, New Zealand), is an external HDTV tuner for personal computers. It actually has two independent tuners, and interfaces to the computer via ethernet. The device is supported by MythTV (since v0.20), as well as many other PVR software packages.

Since it tunes only digital signals (OTA HDTV as well as "Clear" QAM digital cable), which are already MPEG2 encoded, it has no MPEG encoding hardware.

Setting up IR Forwarding

The HDHomeRun (HDHR) is capable of forwarding IR commands via your LAN to LIRC. This can save you some money on purchasing an additional IR receiver for your frontend. However, the IR receiver is very directional and may require you to aim the remote directly at the HDHR. These instructions come from the Silicondust website.

If you don't have them installed already, you need the hdhomerun_config tools installed. If you're using Ubuntu or one of its derivatives, you can install this by entering the following within a terminal:

sudo apt-get install hdhomerun-config

Now that you have the HDHR software installed, you need to figure out what the <device id> of your box is. Do this by entering the following command:

hdhomerun-config discover

You should get a result that follows this format:

hdhomerun device <device id> found at <device IP address>

Now you need to tell the HDHR to send IR commands to your frontend's IP via a specific port. Port 5000 is used below, but it can be set to any unused port. Just make sure you remember what you set it to because we'll be using that when setting up LIRC.

NOTE: Silicondust's website says that you can save the IR target to the HDHR's flash memory using the following command. I've had difficulty getting this to work, but here's the command. If this doesn't work either, you'll just need to issue the above command whenever your HDHR is unplugged and sometimes if your router gets reset.

The last thing to do is to get LIRC listening for IR commands being sent from your HDHR. We'll kill any lircd processes first, just to be sure. Then we'll get LIRC listening on the proper port. We're using port 5000 again here, because that's what we told the HDHR to use. If you used another port, you'll need to specify that same port here.

sudo killall lircd
sudo lircd -H udp -d 5000

That's it. If mythfrontend is already running on your machine, you'll need to exit out of it and restart the frontend (just the application, not the computer) for it to work.

Run hdhomerun-config discover and make note of the actual device ID, use this instead of FFFFFFF

delete the HDHR tuners and re-add them

For at least one user, the above set of steps solved the problem of getting 0 channels reported. The hdhomerun-config may be required for the scanner to work properly?

Can't Connect to HDHR?

You may have a firewall in the middle blocking traffic. If so, an easy solution is adding a firewall rule that permits all traffic to and from the HDHR.

The following example uses the HDHR's mac address to avoid any hassles with IP changes:

-A INPUT -m mac --mac-source HDHR:MAC:ADDRESS -j ACCEPT

It is convenient (or maybe required for your OS flavor when using a GUI to edit the rules) to store this rule in an external file.
For example, on Fedora, /etc/sysconfig/iptables-hdhomerun, and add a custom rule that refers to that file.

Fixing HDHomeRun Channel Scanning in MythTV .20

Note these instructions are seemingly obsolete, and have nothing to do with channel scanning not getting a channel because the signal was not strong enough. (mythfrontend, but surprisingly not mythtv-setup, has a configuration setting for minimum signal level to offer the channel. Default is 65%)

In order to get channel scan working correctly in MythTV .20, you need to get the RPM's that Jarod Wilson patched with the .20-fixes including the fix for HDHR. Update the following packages:

You should be able to scan channels using mythtv-setup now. If you have any problems (missing tables and such) try deleting all the channels first and then rescanning. I ended up getting a clean start by deleting all channels and capture cards then starting fresh with these packages.

Network Connection

The HDHomeRun normally expects to obtain a DHCP lease. However, with the latest firmware it is also possible to configure it statically. This is particularly convenient if you want to connect the HDHomeRun directly to a NIC on your MythTV system, rather than through a switch on your network. To do this, configure your local interface with a static IP address in the range of 169.254.x.x (eg. 169.254.1.10) with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0 and no gateway.